


Edna's Boy

by PrairieDawn



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Gen, Korean War, Meatballverse Compliant, Ottumwaverse Compliant, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 08:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrairieDawn/pseuds/PrairieDawn
Summary: Walter O'Reilly wants to join the army.  Edna O'Reilly wishes she understood why.





	Edna's Boy

Ed McMann was a thick man and not tall, given to few words. He’d buried a wife years ago, and one child, the others all grown and gone now. They’d buried Edna’s older boy Joe going on ten years ago and he knew his sister still cried at night over him from time to time. Christmas. His birthday. The first snow of winter—Joe had loved the snowfall, would have spent the whole day outside making snow angels if you let him. He hated to bury the other O’Reilly boy. He regarded his nephew over wire framed glasses that matched the boy’s in all but prescription, and even then, they’d been known to share in a pinch. 

Walter had a farmer’s muscle under the lingering baby fat, but the army was going to eat that boy alive. “You’re a damn fool, Walt,” Ed told him.

“I gotta do this, Uncle Ed.”

“You don’t gotta do nothin’.”

Kid kneaded his hat in his hands. “You just don’t understand.”

“Hell I don’t.” He folded his arms across his overalls. “Well, seeing as I can’t convince you to stay, can I convince you to shake your old Uncle Ed’s hand for luck?” He held out one weathered and not completely clean, even this early in the day, hand.

Walt reached out to take it and Ed pulled him in for a hug, patting him twice on the back. He backed off then, the midwestern reticence that Walt had never properly cultivated asserting itself. “Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t talk yourself up too much. You’ll do OK.” He tucked his hands back into his overalls pockets. “You write, now.” Walt nodded. The kid watched him with those eyes that reminded him too much of Ed’s own mother. Ed left him standing next to the truck and walked all the way back to the barn without letting himself look back.

*

 

Walt was already sitting in the driver’s seat of the truck when Edna left the house. Ed was nowhere to be seen. Must be back at the barn. “I can drive,” she told him.

“I know, Ma,” he told her. “I want to drive the truck.”

On the highway? Edna couldn’t stop herself from thinking. Walter gave her a look that bordered on mutiny. “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, young man.”

“I can drive on the highway,” he insisted. “I’m a great driver.”

“You’re a fast driver, son,” Edna complained but she settled herself into the passenger seat nonetheless. Walt started the truck, twice, then backed down the long dirt drive, made a three point turn and drove, slower than usual up to where dirt gave way to gravel. They still kicked up a cloud of brown dust behind them.

Walt lay on the gas once they hit gravel, as though he were anxious to be out of the tiny, unincorporated village where he’d grown up. The route they were taking was near the same as the school bus made every day, transporting the dozen kids in the village to the big high school in Ottumwa, a bus Walt had ridden every day until just before Christmas. “I still don’t understand why you think you have to do this,” she told him.

“I want to do something new. See new people. Go new places.”

The exasperated huff escaped Edna’s lips before she could recall it. “What’s wrong with right here?”

He didn’t answer right away. Dust blew up behind them in grayish brown billows; the truck rattled around them. He sat back against the cracked seat, arms bracing the steering wheel, fingers wrapped around it too tight. Tension prickled in the truck’s cab. The speedometer approached sixty miles an hour on the crunching gravel. He hit the brakes, the tires locked and slid for a moment before he eased up and allowed them to roll to a stop just before the intersection that led to a paved road. They turned toward Ottumwa and accelerated again. “There’s nothing wrong with here, Ma,” he said.

“But there’s something wrong with you,” she guessed.

Walt shrugged.

“You know, it won’t matter how far you go, you can’t leave yourself behind,” she told him. 

They passed another mile of soy and corn before Walt said, in a voice almost too small to be heard over the rattling roar of the old truck’s engine, “I can try.” 

Edna sat quietly, clutching her purse on her lap, until buildings replaced fields on the outskirts of Ottumwa. “Uncle Ed and I go to Carl’s Diner when we go into town,” Walter said. “You hungry?”

Walt and Ed were always hungry. Came from all the farm chores, she supposed. “I could have a slice of pie,” she allowed. And an hour or so more before you’re gone, she didn’t say. Walt pulled the truck up to a white clapboard building. “They’ve got really good chocolate cream pie,” he said.

“My favorite,” she agreed, and with the price of cocoa a rare treat at home. She let him open the door for her and pull out a chair, as though they were just out for a day of shopping rather than the last time they might see each other for a year or more. A girl Walt’s age sashayed past their table in a pale pink uniform, giving Walt a cheery smile and holding up a finger to let them know she would be right back.

A minute later she returned. “Hey Walter! I missed you at school.” She turned to Edna. “You must be Mrs. O’Reilly. Pleased to meet you. I’m Doris.”

“Pleased to meet you, Doris,” Edna replied.

“So what can I get you two today?”

“Ma?” Walt asked.

“Whatever you like, son.”

“I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich and a stack of pancakes, and we’ll have two slices of chocolate cream pie. And a grape Nehi. Milk, Ma?”

“That would be fine, Walt.” Give him the chance to be the man for once.

“I’ll be right back,” Doris said, spinning back toward the kitchen just fast enough to make her skirt flounce prettily around her knees. 

“Seems like a nice girl,” Edna said, once she’d gone.

Walt shrugged. “So, I’m thinking I’d like to try for the signal corps.”

“That’s radios and such, right?” Edna could get him an apprenticeship at the radio repair shop, she thought.

“Ma. I’m not staying.”

“I just…”

“Ma. I can’t stay here. I need to—I want to join the army now. It’s better if I join now.” He toyed with the silverware on the table.

“I just wish I understood what you’re trying to prove.” Wasn’t being a farmer good enough?

“Ma,” he said. “It’s not about you or the farm or anything. I just need to go for a while.”

“Walter,” she said. “Is there something going on? Something at school? Did you do something?” The idea that Walt might do anything that he’d have to run away from was almost impossible to believe. He was a good boy. And as far as she knew he’d never even had a girlfriend.

“Ma!” he spluttered, reddening. “I didn’t do anything.”

And that smelled of a lie. “Walt. Why did you really stop going to school?” He’d come home one Thursday, the first week of December, with a black eye and a story about running into someone during gym class. He’d claimed a headache the next day, and then Monday and Tuesday of the next week he’d walked down to the near frozen stream at the edge of the property instead of getting on the bus. Ed found him. He was too old for Ed to tan his hide for playing hooky, and Edna didn’t know what had gone on between the two of them out on the lake, but he hadn’t gone back to school after that.

“Not now, Ma.”

She looked up. Doris was returning with their plates and drinks. “Grilled cheese sandwich, pancakes, pie, and a grape Nehi for you, Walt. And I assume the other slice of pie is for you, Mrs. O’Reilly?”

“Thank you, Doris,” Edna said. The girl set her milk next to the pie.

“I miss seeing you in English class,” Doris told him. “You always asked the most interesting questions.”

“Mr. Olsen didn’t think so,” Walt replied. “Anyway I’m joining the army.”

“You? The army?” She laughed, lightly and not unkindly.

“Why not me?” Walt protested.

“I just can’t imagine you holding a gun. Much less using it.”

“I’m going to be in the signal corps. I won’t need to use a gun.”

Doris nodded. “I guess that’s all right then.” She left them to their lunch.

“Doris doesn’t even know what the signal corps is,” Walt complained, then started on his sandwich. He ensured his mouth was full for the next several minutes so Edna couldn’t ask questions. She’d have him alone soon enough. For the moment, she lingered over her pie.

Once they paid the bill and got back in the truck, Edna put a hand on Walt’s wrist to stop him from starting the car. “What really happened at school, Walter?”

“Nothing important.”

“It was important enough for you to drop out halfway through your senior year.” 

“It’s okay, Ma. I’m not that smart anyway.” 

And there it was again. Walter was a late talker, maybe not so late as Joe, but he was pushing four years old before the words came. He was small and strange, like both her boys, touched by the fairy blood that ran through her family. Joe had never gone to school, but Walt was a smart boy and she’d taught him at home until the third grade, then he’d done all right. Maybe he wasn’t smart, and Edna had her doubts about that, but he worked harder than any boy in that school. “Walt.”

“I got in a fight with the wrong person.” He started the engine and pulled back onto the street.

She guessed someone mistreated an animal. That might just set him off. One of the bigger boys, maybe on the football team. But how could it have been so bad he felt like he had to leave school? Leave town? And her not have heard word one about it.

“It wasn’t an animal, Ma.”

“What, then?”

“Some people really don’t like it when you answer questions they haven’t asked yet.”

“Someone punched you for that?”

Radar pulled up to a stop sign, fingers tapping on the wheel. “Ma. I got expelled. For cheating.” They pulled up to a small plain fronted building with the army logo pasted to the inside of the window. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He turned off the truck. “Anyway, I’m going to be careful from now on. More careful. I’ll watch people’s faces closer and I won’t say crazy stuff.”

“And then people will like you?” She put a dubious twist on the words, hoping he’d understand her meaning.

“And then they won’t shake their heads and cluck their tongues and think of me as ‘just a bit less tetched than his poor brother Joe.’ I don’t want to always be around people who are sorry for me. Or scared of me. I want to start over.” He got out of the truck, leaving the door open so she could walk around to get in the driver’s seat. 

She stopped him in front of the truck’s grille. “You want me to walk you to the door?” she asked.

“No, ma.”

The prickling in her eyes was from the dust in the air. “Can I have a hug and a kiss before you go?”

He wrapped short, but strong arms around her and pressed his lips to her forehead. “I’m going to be okay, Ma. I have to do this.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I do.”

He disappeared through the recruitment office door. Edna wished him luck. Maybe the mix of people in the army would make it easier for him to fit in, though her boy’s pacifist tendencies—he’d stopped eating meat at the age of thirteen, for pity’s sake—seemed ill suited to military life. She gave keeping the McMann gift, or curse, under wraps a week, to be generous. Her brother Ernest had picked up the knack early of knowing when people spoke aloud and when they didn’t. Something about the pitch was different, he’d said. He’d managed to teach Walter to hear the difference, but the boy was just so distracted all the time he didn’t always remember to listen properly. Head full of clouds and dreams. She probably should have banned the comic books and rationed the radio plays. His head was all full of Captain Midnight and the Shadow. He thought life outside Ottumwa was going to be all excitement and adventure. 

Edna drove home alone, knowing it would be a long time before she heard from him again, even in a letter. And she was going to find out about this getting expelled thing. Heads were going to roll.

*

The farm was quieter without Walter around. He sent letters every week. Edna and her brother read them in the evenings. She suspected Walter, whose fellow soldiers all called him Radar now, was sugar coating his adventures in the military—not finishing high school had left him underqualified for the signal corps, so he’d had to work his way from private to corporal in the States, working on projects of great strategic importance like cleaning the faces on Mount Rushmore. He’d shown a knack for record keeping and ordering supplies, not surprisingly. He’d been handling supplies for the farm since he was twelve.

She was shooing the chickens into their coop for the night when Ed burst out the door, startling the two turkeys so that they fluttered and pecked around his boots in retaliation. “War’s broke out in Korea. The Chinese and Soviets just invaded the South. They’re already talking about sending our boys overseas again.”

“They sending Walter’s unit?”

“I don’t know, Edna, they don’t tell you that kind of thing on the radio.”

Edna finished rounding up the chickens and closed the door to the coop. “Well, come on, let’s go inside. You know they’ve been working their way up to this, what with the Soviets getting the A-Bomb and all.”

“Thought we were finished with fighting for a while,” Ed said.

Edna rubbed his shoulder while she walked beside him. “So did I.”

Walter’s letters had been suggestive the last month or two. Rereading them at the kitchen table with Ed, she could see he knew. He hadn’t said anything about Korea itself, or war, just mentioned firearms practice and this one short passage, buried in a letter that had arrived three weeks ago. “We’re practicing on dummies, Ma. Shooting them and stabbing them with bayonets. Ma, I can’t do that, not to another person. I won’t. Sergeant says that when it’s him or me I’ll feel different. I don’t think I’ll feel different, Ma. Guess I’m a coward after all.”

*

There was a lag with letters. Usually they arrived a week or two after he wrote them, but they stopped completely for almost two months. Edna was driven to distraction and baking. She was running out of neighbors in need of pies. Ed busied his hands with chores. Those two months saw more repairs to house and garden than Ed had managed to get to in the past two years. Edna checked the mail every day and every day found only catalogs, circulars, and bills.

The war, in the meantime, went badly. It looked like it might be lost within months, almost before it began, and who knew where China and the Soviet Union would strike next. Japan? A frightening thought even if it might just serve them right. When Edna stopped to take a break just after noon on an oppressively hot August day, she felt in the mailbox as usual and found, at last, a letter from Walter. She took the letter inside to lay on the kitchen table, still smudged on one corner with damp soil from her gardening, unopened. She wanted her brother to be there to read it with her.

Ed thumped into the mud room, puttered for what felt like longer than it surely was, then came into the kitchen to wash up at the sink. He sagged into a chair, still ruddy and sweat beaded. One stubby finger poked at the letter. “That what it looks like?”

“It is. Chicken salad sandwich and some cucumbers with sour cream.” She set a plate in front of him and sat down across the table with a plate of her own.

He set his mind to filling his stomach. After he’d polished off half the sandwich and all the cucumbers, he said. “Well?”

She slit the envelope with a thumbnail. Walter’s handwriting had grown more precise and readable over the year and change he’d been in the army. She read to Ed while he finished the other half of his sandwich. The letter was a month old already.

_Dear Ma,_

_Things are changing here. I’ve been sent to a new outfit. The bad news is I’m going to Korea. The good news is I might not have to shoot anybody. My old drill sergeant—you remember, the one who gave me my nickname—pulled some strings to get me a job as the company clerk for a mobile army surgical hospital. I’ll be doing paperwork and getting supplies for all the doctors and nurses. So I get to help save lives instead of taking them._

_We’re shipping out tomorrow. I’ll meet my new CO when I get there. Mail isn’t too reliable in Korea so my letters will come slow. I’ll think of you every night at 2200 hours, that’s ten o’clock at night. If you think of me at 0700 hours, seven in the morning, we’ll be thinking of each other at the same time. Which would be nice._

_I can’t tell you a lot right now because a lot of stuff I’m not allowed to talk about. I’ll write a longer letter later._

_Your son,_

_Walter O’Reilly._

Ed finished his sandwich. Edna carried the dishes to the sink. “If he hadn’t enlisted, he’d have been drafted by now,” Ed said.

“I suppose,” Edna said.

“He’d be in the infantry.”

Edna turned on the water to fill the sink. “My boy, with a gun pointed at other boys. I guess this is the best we could hope for.”

Ed stood to head back out through the mud room door. “You think he knew?”

Edna shook her head. “I don’t know, Ed.”

“Why else would he go, Edna?”

Edna shook her head again, shooing him out the door. “That’s not important any more.”

**Author's Note:**

> This author eats comments for breakfast, lunch and dinner, responds to comments, infodumps in response to comments, and occasionally considers comments to be actual prompts.


End file.
